Most of us don’t think twice about grabbing a shopping cart when we walk into a supermarket, ready to fill them with groceries. We expect these shared pieces of private property to be at our disposal.

It’s the disposal part that has become an issue in many cities and caused the El Cajon City Council to take action Sept. 13. The council voted to require businesses to manage their carts so they don’t become a public nuisance.

The problem stems from people who steal the carts away from retailers and abandon them, creating blight.

Cindi Fargo of the El Cajon Community Development Corporation said that from July 2009 through December 2010, the agency’s Clean & Safe program recovered 826 abandoned shopping carts that belong to two dozen stores, or an average of more than two a day.

From July through December 2008, it retrieved and returned 106 carts to Walmart, 41 carts to Food 4 Less on Ballantyne Street, 20 to the Ralphs on North Second Street and 19 carts apiece to International Foods and Big Lots on Main Street. The El Cajon CDC’s contract with the city to collect the carts ended in June.

“The city of El Cajon has been continuously working on this problem for approximately four years with many retail establishments that provide shopping carts for the convenience of their customers,” said El Cajon Councilwoman Jillian Hanson-Cox. “Most contract out a cart retrieval service but apparently it is not frequently enough to address the problem. Therefore, with the growing accumulation of wrecked, dismantled and abandoned shopping carts within our city, we are being forced to step in once again with an ordinance to mitigate the growing problem.”

The City Council added a chapter to its municipal code Sept. 13 regarding how it will deal with businesses that don’t keep a close eye on their shopping carts and people, typically seniors and homeless citizens, who illegally wheel the carts away from the stores.

Walmart, Home Depot, Sears, Big Lots, Walgreens, Food 4 Less and other stores in the city invest thousands of dollars on their plastic and metal carts, which cost $150 on average.

El Cajon’s new regulations require businesses that allow customers to wheel carts out of the store and into their parking lots to be mindful about keeping the carts within the store’s boundaries.

“We are proposing to make them accountable keeping them on the property,” said El Cajon Community Development Director Melissa Ayres. “We want the stores to be responsible. If they’re going to provide these as an amenity, they need to make sure they stay on their property, or pick them up promptly.”

If requested by a member of the Community Development Department, store managers in El Cajon will need to submit a plan that describes the store’s shopping-cart control system, and store workers will need to supply the city with a monthly cart inventory.

Stores can be asked to employ a wheel-lock system for their carts, among other measures, and fees will be charged if shopping carts have to be picked up and then stored off site by city workers.